The Gorgons are three sisters, creatures of the sea: Medusa (the Queen), Euryale (the Far Springer) and Stheno (the Mighty).
They represent the perverted forces of three drives: sociability, sexuality and spirituality.
Medusa represents the main of these impulses, the spiritual impulse; evolutionary but perverted in vain stagnation.
Whoever saw Medusa remained petrified. The backward gaze freezing all in sickly exasperation. Medusa symbolizes a distorted image of oneself, which petrifies instead of illuminates.
This look backwards, this imaginative exaltation, inhibits restorative efforts.
“Medusa reminds me of other myths, portrayal archetypes like the myth of Orpheus, looking for his wife Eurydice who disappears when he turns to look at her, and that of the wife of Lot changed into a pillar of salt when she turns to look back at Sodom.”